


My Lady

by Pandora



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-10
Updated: 2014-12-10
Packaged: 2018-02-28 21:05:39
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,734
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2747048
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Pandora/pseuds/Pandora
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Despite everything, Dormé loves her mistress very much.  Perhaps too much.</p>
            </blockquote>





	My Lady

Amidala had worn the dark night silk gown that had arrived with the shipment from Naboo only three days before to the reception at the Kuati embassy ballroom. It had a low cut bodice, and was decorated with a scatter of mirror-silver cat clawed things. But then, it was made to look severe, and since Amidala had met with several senators who may not have been her enemies, but were not her friends, she had needed to give that impression. She watched herself inside the mirror while I undid the clasps down the back, and it opened up. Her skin glowed above her corset, before she shook her loosened hair down across it.

The dress fell to around her waist, and I helped her climb out of it. Then I set it aside in a fainted slump across the vanity settee, and turned back to unlace her corset. Her hair smelled like the oil-stained night air outside. But I could still smell her. I wanted to touch her, and she may have still allowed it. She may have wanted me to lean in and kiss the beauty-mark mole on her upper back she had never seen.

She had only worn this corset once before. It was made with thin metal bones, to fit underneath her sleek frock, and it pinched blushed-sore marks on her skin. She must have felt it, but she did not complain. Her reflection even let its mouth drift into a smile.

“Thank you, Dormé,” she said.

I had taken a step back away from her, while I stretched my numbed-stiff shoulders. I had only just stooped next to her for several hours. No one was likely to notice me enough to see that I was several inches taller than Amidala, even when I wore flat heeled shoes, but Captain Typho was right. I had to be careful. I watched my ghost-blurred reflection in front of her as I nodded, and: “Do you wish to retire for the night, Milady?”

“It’s a little early for that. And Senator Danu will want my opinion on the document his office just sent. No. I will change into the green velvet. You know which one.”

Oh yes, I knew. It had been her favorite for the last three weeks, since she had returned from the emergency trip she had taken to Naboo. The other handmaiden, Moteé, and I had not accompanied her. She told us she had spent hours conferring with the latest queen, but that was only partly true. She had been at her Lake Country home, and this dress was stained with Anakin Skywalker’s fingerprints. Most people thought she was friends, only friends, with Jedi Skywalker. She had only recently confessed the truth to me, but I won’t reveal it here. I don’t want to so much as think of it.

“Of course. Do you need anything else?” I said. My voice almost stumbled over the second word. She didn’t seem to have heard me, but if she had been listening, it wouldn’t have been enough for her to notice.

Moteé didn’t care enough to notice, but Versé and Cordé would have. Versé may have even asked me about it when we had retired to our own quarters downstairs, though I wouldn’t have told her anything. I wished they were still alive, and still here to share my duty with me, but I was (secretly, meanly) glad about that.

“Milady?” I said, when she didn’t answer. She had moved over to the window, and was staring out at the dark ocean of the night sky, and the constant speeder lights swimming past. I waited, holding the emptied dress over my arms.

“Oh!” she said, with a startled gasp, and turned around to see me. She was only wearing her knickers now, and I could see her dark pubic hair, and her porcelain cold thighs, through the frail cloudwhite fabric.

Then: “After you’ve finished in the wardrobe, tell Threepio I need to speak with him. That should be all for the night.”

Once, we would have discussed the evening. Or rather, I would have listened while she went over how it had gone. I would have nodded, making certain to look gently amused, when she mentioned, and then dismissed, the new Senator from Onderon who had been flirting with her at the reception. She had never been interested in any of the men who hinted, or bragged, that they fancied her—and while I had once watched that with relief, I couldn’t manage it anymore. The Onderonian Senator had been moon-eyed and hopeless. I wondered if he felt as I had, once, when he saw her.

But I didn’t want to remember all that. I took the summergreen, lilygreen dress out of the wardrobe, and returned to the bedroom. Amidala didn’t look up from her perch on the settee as I set the dress out on the bed for her. She was reading over a message on her datapad, her bare feet pressed together. Her toenails were gilded a pale moonlight silver.

She didn’t look away from the datapad when she said: “Dormé. There is one other thing you might do for me.”

“What would that be, Milady,” I said.

She looked up, and I recognized the smile she gave me, though I was no longer (and _had never been_ ) the only one to see it. “I think you know.”

“Perhaps, “ I said. She waited for me to come over to her at the settee. Her eyes were glossy from the icewater cold light of the datapad as I leaned down to meet her, and she let her breath out in a sigh before her mouth met mine in a kiss. It was only the once, but that was still enough. I was already nervously-waiting and wet between my legs.

\--

I had not expected to fall in love, soon after my first sight of her, with the woman I was supposed to resemble. Alfleda, the girl I had been madly and terribly in love with when I was fourteen, during the one year my father was the visiting scholar at the university in Aldera, had been pale with leaf-blonde hair and green eyes and chewed sore lips. And Lilias, the woman I had been once certain I would spend the rest of my life with, had honey-brown hair and pale blue eyes. She had blacked her eyebrows, and had thin needle-sharp fingers. I had thought I had loved them--before I met Amidala.

I didn’t forget about Lilias. But I had left her behind on Naboo when I entered the Senator’s service, and Captain Typho expected us to have the same relentlessly devoted focus on our duties as he did. When I heard she had taken up with someone else, it didn’t pain me. I had already begun to know I wouldn’t see her again.

Amidala only preferred women who could have been her image in the mirror. Sabé, the girl who had been her first decoy, had been her lover for years. She had even slept with Cordé several times, though I knew Cordé saved her blushing sweetheart looks for young men. She hadn’t been with Moteé, though I had watched from the shadows when they had kissed for the first (and I suspected, the last) time.

But I couldn’t forget that she hadn’t spoken with Sabé since she had stepped down from the throne. She hadn’t loved her. And she didn’t love me.

\--

Several hours later, Amidala was still at work over her datapad. She could have sent some of the files to her senior aide, but she never did. The protocol droid, C3PO, had gone into her room with a pot of hot black tea an hour before. The apartment. Moteé had gone downstairs to her room when I had dismissed her before I left for the reception—or at least, I wanted to hope she had. She might have sneaked out into the city again. Typho had left for the night after a double shift, and his lieutenant had taken over. I had heard the echo of his footsteps as he came through on his rounds.

He had only been hired on six months before, and he would not have believed, if he had ever heard it, that I had once done his job.

That was before the assassination attempt which had successfully killed Cordé and Versé, and the guards I only knew as names. Anakin Skywalker and his master had arrived with orders from the Chancellor, and I had learned that I was only the waiting-lady other people assumed, if they even saw me, I was—and that I always had been.

After I made a cup of tea in the kitchen unit, I went into the sitting room and sat on one of the sophas with my datapad. The balcony doors were closed, and I could only just make out the whisper from the fountain. I could have gone out. It had been several years since I had used a night-off to watch a play at the small theatre I had read about on one of the arts review sites.

But I only watched the sky on the other side of the balcony windows. C3PO shuffled down the hallway towards Amidala’s room.

She had always been fond of him, but then (I thought in a clenched-mean whisper that didn’t sound like me) _Of course she does he was the one who made it_.

I looked back at the novella I had called up on the datapad, and found the last paragraph I had read. But after several sentences, I couldn’t remember any of the words, and I had admitted I didn’t care what they said. The chrono chirped through the quarter hour. It was set for Naboo time, and it told me that it was mid-morning in Theed, and almost 14:05 during the night at my parents’ house.

Finally, I shut down the datapad and set it aside. I pulled the pins out of my hair, and shook it out of the hairstyle Moteé had done it up in. I combed my fingers through it. It was silkwarm and heavy. I could even smell the Queen Yarm rose shampoo I had used.

Amidala had left her door cracked open an inch for me. She was standing in the glowing lights from the window in the green dress. When I closed the door behind me, she turned and, twisting and squirming behind her, opened the back of the dress, and let it fall down into a puddle around her feet. I think she smiled.

\--

Then I had caught her, and she let out a gasped giggle as I caught a handful of her hair in my fingers, and we were kissing and kissing. Her mouth tasted like the black tea when I pushed my tongue into her mouth. Her hands hovered over my back as she held me against her, and then she cupped my arse. Before I could stop it, I wondered, and cared, if she did that with him. She gave me one last bruising-hard eager kiss before she stepped away from me. Her nipples were hard, and I could hardly stand the several feet between us. I wanted to fuck her, to leave my fingerprints on her.

She looked as earnestly innocent as she had the day I had met her when she said: “You need to get out of that dress, Dormé.”

I turned around, and she unfastened the back of the nightblue linen gown I had worn to the reception hours before. She kissed the side of my shoulder, and then down my back, as I got out of the dress. My breasts ached as she pulled up my chemise for me, and I took it off. I found all of my clothing on the settee later, but I don’t remember how that happened.

Then she fell back across her bed, on the expensive milk-white sheets, and the lamplight spilled over her skin. After I had kissed her small breasts, her rose petal nipple, and down onto her stomach, I pulled her knickers down over her birdboned sharp hipbones, and she lifted her arse to help me. She spread her legs open, and I moved in, and kissed her there, once, as though I were kissing her on the mouth, before I licked over her clit.

She made a hissed-sharp gasp and jerked towards me as I licked her, and slid several of my fingers inside her. She didn’t take long to come. When I sat up again, she gave me a sly teasing nudging smile. Her hair was flung around her on the pillow, and she pulled me down until I could feel the kissed-warm air of her breath:

“It’s your turn now, Dormé. I have always done my duty,” she said.

I turned over onto my back, and she was sleek and fevered, glowing warm as she straddled me, and kissed and nipped at my neck, and then (she couldn’t be like this with him, _she couldn’t_ ) she kissed my nipples, and my thoughts flew into pieces. I stared up at the ceiling as she started to go down between my legs, and I felt her tongue there.

“Oh, Milady,” I said, when she stroked her tongue against my clit. It almost hurt for that first moment, but it was what I wanted. “You’re so, so--”

“Ssssshhh,” her voice said above me. “You don’t have to say it.”

The green dress was still in a heap where she had left it on the floor in front of the window. When I picked it up later, it smelled of rosewood perfume. It didn’t smell like Anakin Skywalker, light years away in the Outer Rim, at all.

\--

It was two years after that, and one year after I left her service, that I realized that I had loved Amidala too much, so much I could not love anyone else. I had not seen her even once after that last day at her apartments. She had already replaced me with another woman, though this one did not resemble her. I had returned to Naboo, and a life at to one of my family’s houses in the Lake Country. But when I heard Amidala’s death announced on the air-radio, it was over in a single burned-out instant. I looked over at the woman I had thought I loved, and she didn’t look like anyone I had ever met.

“What’s wrong?” she said. I only turned up volume on the air-radio, and the voice of the woman, the royal communications officer, repeating the news.

I had to make myself look back at the woman with me. Her name was so bright I couldn’t think it. I had betrayed Amidala for her.

“She’s dead,” I said, before she could tell me what I knew she would think. “And it ought to have been me. I should have taken her death, and I _failed_.”

(And: I remembered the New Year’s celebration we had had the first year we were all on Coruscant, even though it was the first month of winter there. Typho had brought a bottle of apple wine for it. Amidala had worn the traditional snowflowers in her hair, the first flowers of the spring. They had scattered all over the bed when we made love, when we _fucked_. The housekeeper picked them all up the next morning.)

I won’t bother to repeat what the woman had begun to tell me. She wasn’t from Naboo, and she had never wanted to understand, and appreciate, what it meant to be a handmaiden. I didn’t expect that she would learn how now. I turned away from her. Her voice faded off behind me as I went into the bedroom and started packing, for the funeral in Theed, and then after that, for the rest of my life.

Perhaps I should have looked back at her before I left in the boat, but I didn’t. I shouldn’t regret that, but sometimes, when I’m trying to sleep, I do. I know what I would have seen. She would have been standing in our courtyard above the dock, with her dyed cherry-red hair, her witch-black skirt swishing in the breeze. I could have done that much for her. It wasn’t her fault that I hadn’t been able to love her.

*


End file.
